Miniblogging: Tumblr

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Cash Money/Universal Motown’s Lil Wayne long-awaited rock album, Rebirth, hit yesterday, and looks on track for between 140-150k in first-week sales as he prepares to be imprisoned for a year on gun possession charges.

The music buying public - and they're still around - are embracing single tracks with a passion. And why wouldn't we? The idea that we no longer have to shell out for complete collections of music regardless of how much we like the padding is one of the sweet joys of the digital era. Even ill-thought-out b-sides can be avoided.

The record labels, of course, don't like it. They've grown rich over the years by dumping a load of snouts-and-trotters into the album mix, bulking up a couple of good tunes into a ten quid album.

Watching them try to find a way to make people buy tracks they neither want nor need is, perhaps, even more heartbreaking than watching the labels attempting to try and rebuild a business distributing circles of plastic in a world without warehouses or shop shelves.

In an acknowledgment of growing consumer dissatisfaction with the traditional CD format, for the first time a major label is replacing the typical 10-plus song CD release with two six-song CDs whose release dates are separated by mere months.

A six track album? Isn't that just an EP?

Blake Shelton is the first to have his music released on this brand-new seventy year-old format, and he's excited:

Shelton says industry reaction has been positive and ultimately, its better for his fans. "Fans will get more music than me putting out a new album every two years," he said. "It's a quicker way to get new music to them."

There are two sorts of fans - the very few who would have loved a ten track album anyway, and the other sort, for whom the fact the couple of tracks they want are spread out over two collections, instead of one, will make no difference.

It's not clear why Warners assumes people will buy two records of stuff they don't want instead of simply not buying one.

Sad to hear of the death of Ian Carmichael, which is being reported by the BBC. Although best-known as an actor - he's probably the best screen Peter Wimsey - he had a small side concern going knocking out records in the mid-1960s. Most notably, he reunited with his television Butler Dennis Price to record a Jeeves And Wooster single, What Would I Do Without Jeeves for HMV in 1966.

As far as I can tell, his last released record was on Noel Edmond's Listen With Mother collection for BBC Records And Tapes. Although that was reading (The Cat Who Wanted To Sing Carols) rather than actually singing.

Yes, it's a noisy one today. Hailed by Maximum Rock & Roll as a blend of Anti-Flag and Attention Deficit, meet Intro5pect.

Normally, any band which replaces a perfectly serviceable letter with a number would be barred from appearing within a quarter mile of No Rock, but blending shouting, a little bit electronica, punk and politics is enough to win us over.

First, find the JLS video pane on my website. Then hold the star up to your webcam, as demonstrated by my colleague Lia Nicholls.

If the webcam can see the star, a performance of One Shot will start playing. If you remove the star, it will stop.

And moving the star in three dimensions moves the lads around too, with you in the background.

Oh. Augmented reality using a webcam? Sure, that might have impressed my grandfather, but - since Radio One tried and quickly abandoned the gimmick two years ago - you'd have to stretch the truth a bit to describe it as either "amazing" or "new".

Back in the pre-internet age, before instant gratification was made a right under European Law, we would collect tokens from Smash Hits week after week, sending them off and waiting for some badges through the post. Innocent times.

Collect four tokens which will be printed in The Sun starting tomorrow and send them with a stamped addressed envelope back to us for your chance to be in the 3,000-strong crowd for the exclusive Bizarre gig.

If you're under thirteen, the concept of "stamped addressed envelope" must surely be a foreign one. Perhaps next week Gordon's going to come up with a competition that uses the phrase "...or the back of a sealed-down envelope".

Still, it's quite a smart move to try and sell extra copies of the paper to that all-important tone-deaf pre-teen demographic that advertisers are always trying to chase.

Clearly, though, there are more than 3,000 JLS fans at the moment, and they can't all fit in the gig. What do you get then?

All entries will get an exclusive JLS lanyard along with signed pictures of the band, worth around £5 and not available from any other outlet.

If Gordon says a photo and a laminate on a string is worth "around £5", who are we to disbelieve him?

And that's not all.

Order now and Gordon will add in a mini nasal-hair clipper and free shipping...

Oh, hang on: it's not that:

You will be able to watch an exclusive JLS performance on your computer, thanks to amazing new technology which I'll be revealing in Bizarre tomorrow.

"It's called a webcamera and scientist believe that within twenty years, this technology could be used to broadcast music gigs direct to people's computers in their homes."

"In regards to the ASCAP lawsuit against Connolly's Pub and Restaurant, ASCAP was solely responsible for naming Bruce Springsteen as a plaintiff in the lawsuit," Springsteen's representatives said in a statement on Thursday. "Bruce Springsteen had no knowledge of this lawsuit, was not asked if he would participate as a named plaintiff and would not have agreed to do so if he had been asked. Upon learning of this lawsuit this morning, Bruce Springsteen's representatives demanded the immediate removal of his name from the lawsuit."

I'm no moral relativist - oh, alright, I am - but isn't 'playing a couple of songs without the paperwork' less of an evil than 'stealing someone's name to bolster a lawsuit against someone who played a couple of songs without paperwork'?

Isn't this stealing Springsteen's identity? Isn't that worse than borrowing a couple of songs which didn't cost him anything?

It's feeling a bit grim for 6Music at the moment, a station which sits in the BBC Radio family knowing that if the going gets hard in the next couple of years (and by that, we mean "if Cameron gets in"), it's going to be very hard to survive. The sounds of idiots shouting "why not sell of Radio One and Two, because they're probably no different to Heart, I should imagine, if I'd ever listened to them" will be hard enough to cope with; you fear that a network which can only claim to be distinctive and interesting will struggle in such an environment.

You hear a lot about how terrible it is being a record label these days - but they're still quite nice little businesses. In fact, if they started to spend less time trying to force the world not to change, they could have a happy life making hundreds of thousands of pounds every year.

Take EMI, for example. £300,000,000 earnings before tax and write-downs last year. Sure, it's not an oil company, but it's a nice business. Not even managed decline, is it? Manage the reinvention of the business, and you'd be fine.

That is, unless you did something stupid like loading the company down with millions of debt it barely has a hope of repaying. That sort of stupid.

At the end of March, Black Francis is releasing a new album - NonStopErotik. To celebrate, he's put a few thoughts down in a press release:

I finally came into possession of an old guitar someone had given me at a nightclub in San Francisco awhile back; Eric Drew Feldman had been holding it for me there on Haight Street. He convinced me that it looked cool (it was black) and had been given in the spirit of benevolence. Every time I picked it up a nice chord came out and so I lovingly cleaned it with red wine in the dressing room the following night and began to write. I told the tour manager that we would drive in my Cadillac directly to a recording studio in Los Angeles (and could he book one, oh, and a rhythm section, too?) from the gig in San Luis Obispo which would put us at the studio at about 4am. It all happened according to plan and we cut the initial tracks there in the wee hours over a few days, and then moved on to an equally haunted studio in London and Eric Drew Feldman joined us there and we finished the record in St. John's Wood. Like I said the studio was haunted and I wrote many a couplet by candlelight in the studio accommodation, slept very little, and only felt the need to get the fuck out of there fast on the last night. The spirits had not ever bothered me, other than low drama moral support, but I was informed that they had heard enough and it was time to move on; plus I had a gig in Ireland.

When I was a boy the plant we boys called a fern was code for vagina, and to this day I love fern plants. In my heart the vagina is almost everything, and almost everything else could be summed up in what cock and seed have to offer; and everything else? The love of the father, dead or alive, the pain of too much pleasure, till death do us part, the voice of another song man from the other side, with or without God, Teri and the Possibilities, where ever you may be, the smell of sex in the air, seduced, slain, on my knees in prayer, sucking at the only thing that matters, my own personal Meret Oppenheim, I am Man Ray and I want you and to be all the way inside you, the cameras whirring as we put some elbow grease into the scene, the audience watching us in the dark.

And not just any old plagiarism. Oh, no - Men At Work have stolen from the Girl Guides:

The Australian band Men at Work are facing a big legal bill after a court ruled it had plagiarised a Girl Guides' song in its 1983 hit, Down Under.

Although, actually, the song doesn't belong to the Girl Guides at all; it's actually owned by Larrikin Music.

They're seeking between 40% and 60% of the earnings from the song.

The big question is why the company didn't come forward until over twenty years after the song was released. Perhaps its one of those where you go "this reminds me of something... ooh, what is it?" For a couple of decades.

The court decided that Down Under borrows a little too heavily from Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.

Still, the sorry story does allow the BBC News website to explain the song as if it was part of the court report:

A number one in Australia, the US and the UK, the song tells the story of an Australian backpacker touring the world.

It pays tribute to "a land down under where beer does flow and men chunder".

The song also refers to the popular Australian food spread Vegemite.

"I said 'Do you speak my language?', he just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich," says an Australian traveller in Brussels.

Now, in other news, upset following a cake being left out in the rain by persons unknown. The cake's owner is said to be struggling to come to terms with the event, a situation worsened as she is unlikely to have the recipe again.

Mind you, given that Bizarre is still giving prominence to that JLS joke about selling condoms, perhaps Gordon is running 'fashion model does sexy shoot' as he hasn't got anything else at all to go with.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

A complaint seeking damages for an alleged assault by John Lydon has been settled.

Roxane Davis has accused Lydon of attacking her because he was unhappy with a hotel room she had booked for him. The courts have been informed that a deal has been reached; nothing, as yet, has been made public. So it's not clear if he's going to have to do another set of butter adverts.

Although this has prompted a rash of 'end of an era' pieces, Resident Advisor observes that it's just a geographical reflection of an extant existential distance:

[Goldsworthy] points out that he has done very little work with DFA in the past two years, though he would be willing to do more production or remix work for the label "if something good came along and I got offered it."

Apparently, Goldsworthy didn't bother to let DFA know he was off. Nobody wants to have a conversation in which they say "actually, I think Britain's a much better place to raise kids..."

Not quite sure that yer average Sports Fan is really going to enjoy bellowing about how we grow up but our hearts get torn up. Perhaps the idea is to encourage sales of Budweiser by encouraging Americans to drown their sorrows.

Apparently, what would expect to be a gulf between the two sides politically can be quite easily bridged:

"[We] found a ton of common ground in our aim to make upbeat danceable tracks celebrating female friendship, strength, and of course, PARTYING," [Johanna] Fateman said. "For a feminist band obsessed with pop music, it was pretty much a dream come true."[

Hmm. Yes, there's clearly common ground - although much of Aguilera's after school movie emoting has sounded more talking point than heartfelt belief - but isn't the central message of Aguilera's career curve been about how you can sell a lot, lot more records if you take your pants off for a Maxim cover or two? Isn't there even a discussion to be had there rather than just going "woo - we all like to PARTY"?

I could very well be wrong - but what's disappointing is that Le Tigre don't even seem to want to tell me why I'm wrong.

SCOUTING FOR GIRLS have joked how they may release a song called She's So Rubbery - on the advice of NOEL GALLAGHER.

When the band played an exclusive Biz Session I told them how Noel joked that their hit She's So Lovely was about a blow-up doll after his daughter kept singing the rubbery lyric.

And on it goes. Roy Stride claims this is "the best story I've ever heard."

Which it might just be.

It seems to escape the band that they're so dull, the most interesting thing Smart can find to say about them is that a small child has misheard their lyrics. Indeed, it's what the whole article is about.

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

The Lefsetz Letter picks up some comments from Josh Groban, apparently tweeted after complaints about a lacklustre charity show:

"I really don’t feel that charity performances should be subject to reviews in the same light as other performances…."

"people give their time, energy and voices, for free and with little to no rehearsal and critics should put away the snot-o-meter."

"just a thought. night!"

This was after a gig where some people had paid over a grand for their tickets. Is it really okay to suggest that because Groban's not pocketing the cash for himself that nobody should complain if a show is a bit rubbish?

Then why bother playing the show at all?

Would Groban feel alright with going to a charity night at a restaurant only to discover that the chef had spat in the spaghetti - but, hey, it's for charity so why should anyone complain?

"Guess who I just spent a week in the studio with?" Manson wrote [on Facebook], before adding, "Would you be pleased if I said one of them was called Steve and one of them was called Duke and another was a Grammy-winning producer?"

Well, perhaps. Unless it's former Brighton and Hove Albion captain Steve Foster, the corpse of John Wayne and Jim Jonsin. Because that would be a cruel trick.

The audience is expected to contain many people too young to have been born when it came out, as part of a special operation to make you feel ancient. Anyone over the age of about 25 will be routinely asked if they ever saw a dinosaur.

My flatmate had the limited-edition special release in wipe-clean white vinyl sleeve, you know.

Gordon has forgotten his main purpose of late - that of running huge, pointless pieces about JLS. The JLS management team have sent their coathangers round to remind Gordon of his duty, and are rewarded with a piece which, once again, has Gordon posing for awkward pictures with the band and running a clanking story which focuses on the sheer amount of sex they have and that:

Aston said: "It's all about staying safe. We all think so. My mum sends me down a stash and I dish them out to the lads so none of us have to worry.

"I'd really be up for doing some kind of campaign about safe sex."

The boys even came up with a name for their contraceptive line - Just Love Safe.

Brilliant.

Yes, brilliant. They've managed to come up with three words starting with specific letters. Truly, they are the Dorothy Parkers of our age.

JLS condoms, eh? The ones you choose if you're really only going to fill them with water and lob them about a bit.

Monday, February 01, 2010

Simon Cowell's stately progress towards his singalong charity single now looks even more embarrassing - he's been lapped by Quincy Jones, who's turned round a remake of We Are The World in about a week.

Obviously, it would be unseemly to compare two charity records both, clearly, motivated by nothing more than a desire to help. (After all: what else could multi-multi-millionaires do than record a song to persuade the poorer to have over a few coins?) But what is taking Cowell so long? It's not like he's got to make a song which sounds any good, is it?

Back at the end of 2007, Rolling Stone ran a piece about indie bands which looked oddly like a Camel cigarettes advert. There was an angry letter at the time, but Xiu Xiu and Fucked Up decided to take it further by launching a class action lawsuit.

"Simply put, there is no legal precedent for converting noncommercial speech into commercial speech merely based on its proximity to the latter," Justice Robert Dondero wrote. "There is also no precedent for converting a noncommercial speaker into a commercial speaker in the absence of any direct interest in the product or service being sold."

So, legally and in the US at least, slapping a load of text in a heavily-sponsored stand alone pull-out isn't meant to use the value of the subjects of the "non-commercial" text to add lustre to the sponsor.

Presumably, Justice Dondero would therefore be incredibly laid-back if someone ran a magazine about him sponsored entirely by massage parlours and escort agencies.

The complaint, surely, wasn't about 'being near some ads', it was about 'being in a sponsored section'; the judge seems to have failed to grasp the difference.

Still, it's handy for Rolling Stone to be reminded that its main purpose is the articles it runs, and not the adverts it carries. Let's hope that news gets back to Rolling Stone.

At the risk of sounding like some actor pretending to be a PC user, we did suggest a few years back that sharing the midweek charts properly might be a way to try and make the charts a bit more interesting for the average person.

At the risk of sounding like a contrary sod, now they're actually going to do it, I think it's probably come way, way too late to actually turn round interest in the best selling singles.

Oh, yes, there were a lot of people exercised about the battle between McElderly and Rage Against The Machine back at Christmas - when Sony turned against Sony - but of those people so exercised, how many could even tell you what's number one this week? Even Joe lost interest once Boxing Day came around. He doesn't even know his record eventually made it to number one. Nobody from his team has bothered to check.

There's a characteristically odd piece of writing from MediaGuardian to welcome plans for Radio One to broadcast the chart:

BBC Radio 1 is to break with more than 40 years of tradition by broadcasting a midweek chart rundown for the first time.

Eh? But for the first couple of decades, the midweek chart rundown was the chart - certainly until the mid 1980s, there wasn't really much opportunity for there to be a half-way chart because it was too slow and expensive to compile the chart proper without giving it a couple of days for numbers to be collected, collated and crunched. So, yes, it is something they haven't done before; and, yes, they could have been doing it for a few years now. But breaking a 40 year tradition? That's a bit over the top.

In a statement it said: "We had planned a short concert for the children on Monday 1 February, featuring an unknown singer, Taylor Bright.

"Unfortunately, the Liverpool Echo has printed an inaccurate story that pop singer Taylor Swift is coming.

"There will now be no concert and the Liverpool Echo has promised to print an amendment."

You have to feel a bit sorry for Taylor Bright, don't you? There is this implication that she's not going to draw a crowd. "We invited Taylor Bright, so obviously nobody was going to come to see that, but then the Echo went and claimed it was someone much, much better. You know, Bright we could have coped with - we'd have come up with some way of hiding the empty seats. But Swift? Jeez, she could pull a crowd. We'd need barriers, stewards, the whole nine yards. Actually, let's not bother with Taylor Bright at all. Ring her up and cancel."

The Echo is contrite:

"The Echo regrets the mistake in Saturday's paper and has apologised to the school's governors.

"We are making a donation to school funds as a gesture of goodwill."

"... and, hey maybe we should get the kids some tickets to go see Beyonce who we know for a fact is going to be playing Anfield Comp on Thursday, right?"

The Grammys got lucky this year. For a show broadcast from an arena, the Staples Center in Los Angeles, it happened to have top nominees who barnstormed arenas last year — Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Pink, Green Day — and one who already packs enough spectacle for skyboxes, Lady Gaga.

Yes, how lucky that the record label awards featured the record label's largest acts.

Presumably the NYT is thinking of last year's disastrous bad luck for the Grammys, when the nominations were led by Mumbling Jack McMumbles and Fritwave, the Germanic collective of socially phobic mime artists.

Michael Jackson did alright for a dead guy:

It was another thank-you from a music business that continues to owe Jackson more gratitude, now for being the best-selling act of 2009. His poised son Prince, accepting his father’s latest Grammy, said his “message was simple: love,” adding, “We will continue to spread his message and help the world.”

That's a bit awkward, though, isn't it? Jackson sold more than anyone else not because he was good, but because he was dead, so they effectively dragged his son in to pick up a prize celebrating how well everyone did out of his pa dropping dead.

The Grammys featured the by-now-mandated 'surprising' collaborations - "I'll take one from the current Top 40, one from the greatest acts of the 1970s, and a song from whatever TimeLife Records will be plugging at the break". Lady GaGa and Elton John giving way to Stevie Nicks and Taylor Swift and... well, everybody and an out-of-register Michael Jackson:

[T]he Grammys had the 3-D video that would have been shown during Jackson’s “This Is It” concerts, overlaid with live belting by Usher, Celine Dion, Smokey Robinson, Jennifer Hudson and Carrie Underwood. In a song that sees disaster everywhere, none of them matched the anguish in Jackson’s own vocals, but they came surprisingly close. (Those who didn’t have 3-D glasses saw red and green blurs around Jackson’s Edenic rain forest, complete with innocent child, but were spared the equally protruding live performers.)

Seldom has so much effort been expanded on bringing such a lightweight tune before such a grand audience. How can you really sing "oh, we're completely destroying the world with our consumption of raw materials" in a three-minute segment requiring the wearing of plastic glasses and a whole extra set of cameras without corpsing?

It was to be Beyonce's night - indeed, you suspect there was some sort of contractual obligation insisting it was to be Beyonce's night, given she got to do two songs and wasn't forced to share the stage with someone out of Dr Hook.

Kings of Leon did manage to pick up Record Of The Year for Use Somebody in the face of relentless prize-giving to Beyonce.

Here's the winners:

Album of the Year: "Fearless," Taylor Swift

Record of the Year: "Use Somebody," Kings of Leon

Song of the Year: "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On it)," Beyonce Knowles

New Artist: Zac Brown Band

Pop Vocal Album: "The E.N.D.", The Black Eyed Peas

Female Pop Vocal Performance: "Halo," Beyonce Knowles

Male Pop Vocal Performance: "Make It Mine," Jason Mraz

Rock Album: "21st Century Breakdown," Green Day

Rock Song: "Use Somebody," Kings of Leon

R&B Album: "BLACKsummers'night, "Maxwell

R&B Song: "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)," Beyonce Knowles

Rap Album: "Relapse," Eminem

Rap Song: "Run This Town," Jay-Z, Rihanna and Kanye West

Best Rap/Sung Collaboration: "Run This Town," Jay-Z, Rihanna and Kanye West

One of the few bright spots in the Winter Olympics which loom over us like a ski-shoe sliding down our faces forever is the news that Devo are going to turn up in Whistler to do a gig.

Not quite sure I can follow a line from 'winter sports' to 'Devo', but the whole thing will be shown by NBC in the states and, presumably, for a tantalising few seconds make it on to YouTube before getting yanked off again.

Actually, Dan, I'm pretty sure I've read this story about sixteen times before anyway.

Still, Dan runs it like we're going to grab the arms of our chairs and shriek 'never! never!' but, really, it's a bit like holding space over to reveal that Brett Anderson needs a belt to keep his trousers up.

People wrongly accused of illegal downloading would be able to appeal the disconnection before it happened and could be charged by Ofcom, the media regulator, to cover the administrative costs of the appeals process run by the Tribunals Service.

So, to clarify what Mandelson's bill is proposing: if you're unjustly accused of sharing material without the correct licence, you're still going to have to pay a levy to a government body to keep your internet connection.

The whole concept of copyright has gone so far from being about fairness, it's perhaps not surprising that those innocent of all charges will end up out of pocket just to keep access to their blameless connection. The record labels want this; they should fund this.

I'm always slightly suspicious when bands are described as having formed in, say, Helsinki - which is what the official history of Husky Rescue claims - because I know how often American journalists just lump any group from anywhere in the UK as hailing from London, but let's go with the official version. Founded in Helsinki by Marko Nyberg in 2002, Ship Of Light is the third proper album. Naturally, there's a tour in support:

The band is one of those interesting Popguns/Catatonia style arrangements where a female singer (Reeta-Leena Korhola) is delivering lyrics from her heart that, actually, were written by a bloke stood alongside her. How does that work, Marko?

Most of the time I consider vocals as a beautiful extra instrument. Vocals are the most touching element because of they bring a real and organic value you don’t get from other instruments. Why spoil an illusion explaining the content of the lyrics? The whole world around the song will break and the whole illusion may be spoiled. Music and lyrics create a fragile magic and beauty where a song can have a different meaning for everyone.